Alternative
by Mayclore
Summary: Mabel wakes up one morning to find her happy-go-lucky life is no longer so happy-go-lucky. In fact, it's kind of upside down and on fire.


Sunlight snatched Mabel from her sleep at last. She let out a cute groan as the shine pierced her eyelids. "Noooo. Five more minutes. Hours. _Days_," she pleaded, rolling away and into the shadow of her blanket.

Of course, it was much too late for her to try and drift off again. Her internal alarm rang ceaselessly, poking and prodding and yelling until she sat up in bed and glanced around. Dipper was gone – he always seemed to beat her out of bed, even if he were sick. Realizing she was probably going to get yelled at for being late, she started to pick her outfit and slide toward the edge of the bed.

"Today is a hamburger sweater day." The semi-permanent smile that was one of her trademarks took its position as she smoothed down her messy hair. "Where did I even put it?"

She went to stand and begin her search, but fell off the edge and flat onto her face. After spitting out a few splinters, she rolled onto her back and glared down at her lower extremities. "_The heck_, legs."

Except there weren't any legs poking out from under the hem of her purple sleep shirt. In their place was a pleasantly pink fish tail, tipped at the end by an iridescent fin that flopped in response to being addressed. Now that she was looking at it, her brain seemed to be connected to the thing. Stunned, she wiggled the tail back and forth. "Oh. That's...uhhh..."

The fin flopped again, almost as if waving up to her.

"_Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah_!" Mabel's arms flailed as she rolled onto her stomach again. Shrieking, pausing for air, then shrieking again, she tried to drag herself away from her new appendage by clawing at the floor. In short order, her lower half began to propel her along like an inchworm, still screaming, all the way out the open door and to the stairs. Huffing with panic, she flopped around and waved her arms. "I can't get down these without my feet! Help!" In her fit, she allowed her tail to get too far over the edge of the top step. The weight pulled the rest of her body down. Every impact drew a loud grunt from her lips. By the time she came to a rest in the entryway, she felt like she'd just been run through a cycle in the clothes dryer.

"Ow," she groaned, eyes rolling about in her head. The room was spinning too, but she managed to flip back onto her stomach and start inching along the floor. "Grunkle Stan! Grunkle Stan! Someone turned me into a mermaid without my permission! Help!"

She bounced and flopped into the gift shop, desperate to find some authority figure to help her deal with her problem. The shop was empty at first glance – after a moment, though, Mabel could hear the idle tones of Wendy humming out of sight behind the register. "Wendy! Oh thank goodness, I'm freakin' out over here! I've got scales and a fin and I'm just like _whaaaaaaa_? Give me a hand!"

"That's gonna be hard," the redhead said. She stood up from behind the counter. Her face was fuzzy and as orange as her hair, and a pair of fox ears had sprouted from the sides of her head. As she moved closer to the dumbfounded Mabel, her swishing tail came into view. She displayed her furry arms and shrugged. Her hands had became paws. "Heh, sorry. You walked right into the joke."

Mabel took to shrieking again and flopped away. Several times, she bumped into the door to the outside, trying to bash it open with her head. When that failed she simply slumped against it and whimpered. Wendy, blinking with surprise, opened it for her.

She flashed the redhead a smile and got right back to work. "Thank you. _Aaaaaaaaaaaaah_!"

After tumbling down the porch steps, she laid on the grass to get her bearings. "What is going on? Why is Wendy a fox? Why am I Ariel except cuter and better?" Once she'd caught her breath, she crawled through the yard. "Gotta find someone normal. Gotta find..." She paused to allow her brain to register what she was looking at. Across the way was Soos, painting the totem pole. "Soos! Dude! Help!" she called, flopping and sliding over to him at a speed that would make a snail laugh with pity. "Mabel's in trouble! Mabel's in trouble!"

To her utter relief, the handyman looked just like she remembered as he came closer. "What's up? You look somewhat flustered and possibly even upset."

"I'm half fish!" she yelled, pointing down at her happily wiggling tail. "Wendy's like, a really cute fox thing or whatever but that's not _normal_! At least you're...wait." Upon closer inspection, she recoiled at the fact that he was dripping bits of himself onto the ground. "Uh, Soos, you're shedding globs of you."

"Haha! Yeah. My horrible clay golem body doesn't really appreciate humidity. Or heat. Or movement. Or existence." His entire right hand fell off, forcing him to stop and pick it up. "I better go chill in the freezer before I decompose into my constituent molecules. Ha! Chill in the freezer." He affixed his hand with a chuckle, although Mabel's horrified stare, complete with slow eye twitching, made him frown. "Sorry dude. I'll work on my delivery."

She watched him walk away, unable to form even basic sounds to scream with until he finally disappeared into the gift shop. "I don't..." was all she could manage. Head swimming, she flopped along the grass toward the road. "I gotta find Grunkle Stan. Or Dipper. Or someone that's not a fox or a clay thingy from my deepest, darkest nightmares." Moving up the dirt path was very painful. Grains of soil stuck to her palms and arms as she crawled. Her scales emitted an awful scraping noise as she went, too, but fortunately they were harder than the gravel and sand. Even after she entered the treeline and got out of the sun, the muggy air sucked at her stamina. "I'm gonna melt!" she panted repeatedly, sweat pouring out of the parts of her body that still had such glands. "Dipper! Stan! Where are you?!"

After ten minutes of painful, slow, hard travel, she fell to the ground and lay there, gulping for air. Her calls for assistance faded into dry wheezes. "Help...water..."

Just before her eyes could close, a smear of white and pale blue darted across her sight. Shaking off the haze, she tried to track it as it flew around. Once the shape alighted a few feet away from her head, she realized it was a white bat with bluish wings and an oddly familiar hairdo. Despite her distress, the creature pushed all of Mabel's cute-loving buttons. "Aw, you're adorable! Come here little guy!"

With a squeak and a puff of smoke that made Mabel withdraw and yelp, the bat vanished. What emerged from the cloud was Gideon, wearing a white cape that was studded with pink rhinestones over his usual suit. "Why thank you, my dear. It's nice to see that not _everyone_ wants to swing a broom at my alternate form."

Her brain had had just about enough of everything, as evidenced by the blank stare she gave to the psychic. She made herself consider this newest affront to sense and logic one step at a time, and thus started with the most obvious thing. "You need a tan," she mumbled, pointing up at his pastier than usual skin.

"Oh my, I'm afraid not. Direct sunlight causes me to burn like a slice of bread in my old toaster!" He laughed at his analogy for a long while.

Mabel sat up, jaw dropped slightly, as she put two and two together. "You're a bat. You burn in the sun. You...are you a...?"

"A vampire? Why, of course. We've been over this! Now you look like you could use a drink." He reached into his suit and produced a bottle of water. "This heat is going to do a number on your complexion if you stay in it too long."

She took the bottle but did nothing with it. Her focus at the moment was struggling with the fact that her mortal foe and creepy stalker was now a supernatural being. With lips trembling, she let out a sound that was supposed to be speech, but ended up as a whimpered whine instead. Defeated and thirsty, she opened the bottle and started to guzzle.

"Feel better?" Gideon asked, head tilted and hands clasped in front of him.

"Some? Thanks." He took the empty bottle while she dried off her mouth. The water did restore a little of her pep, but dealing with her new reality was still an exhausting weight. "I'ma just go now, I need to find my brother and uncle and a therapist and stuff..."

He nodded, smiling so wide his obnoxious fangs were visible. "Farewell, my sweet!" After shifting into a bat, he flew away.

Once he was gone, Mabel allowed herself to snap again. "_Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah_! This is stupid! Why is everybody all weird and junk now?" Gathering her strength, she started to crawl farther down the road. "Gotta find Dipper. Dipper's never weird, just a dork. Maybe he knows what happened."

The journey was arduous. A half hour's worth of grunting and inching got her to within sight of the main road into Gravity Falls, but it was still several hundred feet away. Even worse, in a few yards she would be forced back into the sun again. Unwilling to fry, her body commanded her to stay in the shade. She obeyed. Overwhelmed, she slid over to, and slumped against, a tree trunk to weep.

"I wanna go home," she wailed, although she paused and glanced around after noting she was basically already there. "I mean, the place where I had feet. I miss my feet." She glared forlornly at her shiny fin, which waved about. "Go away."

Mabel spent about twenty minutes in that spot. A noise soon reached her ears that made her smile. It was the unmistakable, sputtering growl of Stan's old sedan, which she could now see turning off the highway and trundling down the path. "Grunkle Stan!" she shouted, waving her arms. The car came to a stop; while she was preparing to sing his praises, the door opened and he got out.

"Geez, kid, what are you doin' out here? This ain't mermaid weather." He approached but was stilled by the look on her face. "What?"

So much raw fear flooded her mind that she wasn't even capable of sound. Bags formed under her widening eyes as the gray gargoyle that was masquerading as her great uncle drew near. After he got too close, she started to toss and flop in a panicked attempt to escape.

Her efforts propelled her about four feet. Shaking his head, Stan gently picked her up, making sure his deadly claws wouldn't pierce the soft flesh of her upper half. "Easy, Mabel. I think you might be having a heat stroke." His mermaid niece wiggled and whimpered, foaming at the mouth. "Yep." After gently setting her into the front passenger seat, he got back into the car and started driving. "It's gonna be fine. I'll just put you in the pool."

All of her emotion burst forth, and since that revelation was the simplest and easy to deal with, that's the path it took. "Since when do we have a _pool_?!" she yelled at the top of her burning lungs.

"Sheesh." Stan watched her pound her fists on the door and sob noisily. "You sure are grumpy today."

Once they were back at the house, he removed the crying Mabel from the car and carried her around back. Here was a large above ground pool, thirty feet in diameter, which he placed her into. The effect was instant; she perked up the second she was submerged, darting around near the bottom of the pool thanks to her powerful tail.

A few moments passed before she blasted through the surface, gasping for air even though she had just realized, to her horror, that she could breathe totally fine underwater. "Why are you ugly and gray and a monster?!" she demanded, pointing at Stan. "Why is everyone so...not themselves?!"

"You're loopier than I thought. Just stay here until your brother comes back." He waved and walked off, footfalls much heavier than usual. They were so strong that Mabel could feel the vibrations pass through the water.

She shrieked at his leathery wings and slammed his fists against the surface. "I want answers!" Her words were ignored. "Dang it!" The mixture of anger, confusion, and fear was too much for her to take, so she let herself slump over until her human half was submerged. A stream of unflattering curses left her lips, but were muffled into bubbles by the water. A tapping on the side of the pool interrupted her rant and forced her up. "Who's there?"

It was Dipper, arms on top of the pool's wall and smiling. "Hey. Saw Stan put you in. You okay? I heard you yelling at him."

Before trying to answer, Mabel examined her brother. His hair seemed a bit poofier than normal, and his hat wasn't sitting right, and his face looked _off_ somehow, but he still had that smile, and he was still wearing his usual clothes, and for her weary brain the sum total of these things was enough. "I knew you'd be you, bro!"

"Why wouldn't I be me? I mean, besides that stupid carpet." He rolled his eyes at the memory and dipped his hand into the water. "Sorry about not being there when you woke up. I got hungry."

"I don't even care, you're here now." Mabel started to swim to him, but something about his appearance caught in the back of her mind and made her stop.

"What?" He looked back over his shoulder. That's when she saw the ears.

"No." She paddled away and pointed at him, eyes bulging. "_No._"

"Huh?" He reached up and patted at his head. "Are they sticking out again?" Stan suddenly yelled from the house for him, causing those ears to turn toward the sound. "Great. I'll be right back."

She swam to the edge and watched him go, only to be greeted by the sight of his torso stuck to a deer's body. "I—wha—no—wh-wh..." She had reached her limit at last. Almost on its own her tail pushed her back to the center of the pool, where she passed out and rolled in the water, hanging limply near the surface like a dead goldfish.

* * *

Mabel awoke with a start, drenched in cold sweat. She was afraid to even sit up lest she find herself with a fin. In fact, she couldn't even make herself move.

"Hey, sleepyhead." Dipper waved at her from his bed, a silver laptop on his legs. After a closer look, he blinked. "Are you all right?"

She wouldn't return his glance. "F-f-fine," she muttered, eyes firmly locked on the ceiling. Curiosity won out after a few tense seconds, and she tilted her head to see that her brother, while looking concerned, was also one hundred percent person and totally deer free. That was clearance enough for her to wiggle her toes, which she did, and let out a tremendous sigh of relief. "Oh man." After sliding out of bed and beaming down at her legs, she looked up at the computer. "Where'd you get that thing?"

He smiled at her apparent relief before letting his gaze drop back to the screen. "Wendy's letting me borrow it so we can Skype mom and dad tonight. I'm just checking my Tumblr right now."

Mabel mopped the sweat off her brow and grinned. "Talking to your fellow dorks? I bet they miss you."

Dipper waved a hand dismissively and grinned. "Shut up." While she changed sweaters, he suddenly burst out laughing at something on the screen. "Hey, look at this."

"Huh?" She came over and leaned down.

He shifted away so she could get close and pointed. "Cecil pasted your school picture over a mermaid. Isn't it hilarious? I wish Mermando could see it."

Mabel stared at it wordlessly, then suddenly burst into tears and ran from the room.

"Wait! What?" Dipper rubbed at his hair, looking at the empty doorway. "I mean, yeah, his photoshopping skills need work, but I didn't think it was _that_ bad."


End file.
